Every Storm Has an Eye

The storm came without warning, the way most things at Basgiath did. Violet heard the first crack of thunder while she was still in the restricted archives, one hand pressed to a shelf of crumbling texts, the other holding a lamp that swung wildly when the walls shook. By the time she reached the corridor, the sky outside the narrow windows had gone the color of a bruise, and rain was hitting the stone in horizontal sheets. She ducked into the nearest alcove — and found it already occupied. "Sorrengail." Xaden Riorson's voice was exactly what she'd expected: flat, unimpressed, like she was a smudge on his sleeve. "Don't." She pressed past him and pulled the door shut behind her. It was a supply room — shelves of lamp oil and candle stubs, coils of rope, an old crate pushed against the wall. Small. The word that came to mind was uncomfortably small. Another crack of thunder, and the lamp guttered. "The door locks from outside," Xaden said. "I know." "Which means—" "I know what it means." She set the lamp on the crate and sat down beside it, folding her hands in her lap with great deliberateness. Outside, something — a shutter, a door — banged loose and wailed against the wind. "We wait." He didn't sit. He stood with his arms crossed, back against the opposite shelf, watching her with that unreadable expression she'd spent two months trying to decode. The darkness under his eyes shifted slightly in the lamplight, and she thought — not for the first time and not without irritation — that he was infuriatingly difficult to look away from. "You were in the restricted archives," he said. "Yes." "Alone." "I'm aware of how many people I was with." A pause. The rain redoubled. She watched a thin line of water creep under the door and said nothing, because acknowledging it meant acknowledging how long they might be here. "What were you looking for?" he asked. "None of your business." "Everything in this college is my business." "Then you should already know." She looked up at him, and something about his expression had shifted — less assessing, more almost curious, in a way he was clearly trying to suppress. "You don't, though. Do you. You followed me." He said nothing, which was its own answer. "Xaden." His name felt strange in her mouth, too familiar for how little she trusted him, too short for how much space he seemed to take up. "I was looking for signal texts. Old ones. From before the second rebellion." The quiet that followed was a different kind than before. "Why?" His voice had lost its edge — just slightly. Enough that she noticed. "Because the riders in my squad are getting better, and the wingleaders keep changing the signals, and I want to understand the logic before someone gets killed because I read a flag wrong." She looked at her hands. "That's all." She heard him exhale. Heard him push off the shelf. Heard the crate creak when he lowered himself onto the other end of it, keeping a careful distance. "The signals changed after the Airnoak campaign," he said. "Fifty years ago. The old texts won't match current protocol." "I know. I'm working backward from the divergence point." Another silence. Easier this time, which unnerved her. "That's not a bad idea," he said. She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her — not the way he usually did, cataloguing threat levels, calculating angles. Just looking. "Don't sound surprised," she said. "I'm not." He said it simply, without the usual armoring of irony. "You're frustrating for a lot of reasons, Sorrengail. Stupidity has never been one of them." Outside, the storm peaked — a sustained roar that made the lamp flicker to almost nothing — and then, slowly, began to ease. Neither of them moved. "My squad," she said at last, "they'd follow you anywhere. You know that." "I know." "They'd follow me too. Eventually." She wasn't sure why she said it. It was the storm, maybe, or the low light, or the fact that sitting this close she could see the old scar at his jaw and the careful way he held himself like a man used to being watched. "I'm going to make sure of it." "I believe you," he said. It was such a small thing. Four words. She felt them somewhere in her sternum anyway, warm and inconvenient. The door, when she tried it twenty minutes later, swung open freely. The corridor smelled of rain and wet stone and extinguished torches. She stepped out first, lamp in hand, and he followed — and when she glanced back he was watching the sky through the slit windows with an expression she almost recognized. Almost. She turned before he could catch her looking. At the end of the hall, just before they split toward separate dormitory wings, he said, "The pre-Airnoak signal texts are on the third shelf in section nine. Bottom row, blue binding." She stopped. "You didn't have to tell me that," she said. "No," he agreed. She walked away before the warmth in her chest could spread further. Behind her, she heard nothing — no footsteps, no comment — and somehow that was worse. She was still thinking about it when she fell asleep.